Plug for Mr Majestic - The Tout of Bengaluru

Zac O’Yeah’s last novel Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan (which I reviewed here) was a genre-hopping, possibly autobiographical comic noir set in a Sweden that has been colonised by India with many strange results (tandoori mooses, Thums Up-wielding fascists, etc). In contrast, his new novel Mr Majestic – The Tout of Bengaluru is set in the real world, if contemporary Bangalore can be called the real world; here's some information on the book.

I don’t think I’ll be reviewing it, mainly because I’m in the Acknowledgements: Zac thanks me and others for helping him "understand things about cinema". Since that sounds solemn and professorial, I should clarify that most of our conversations centred on memorable bikini scenes in 1980s Hindi films, songs with “hot” lyrics, the possibility that Govinda and Karisma’s moves in “Sarkai lo Khatiya” helped repopulate the earth, and what Anil Kapoor’s chest hair may tell us about the human condition. I don’t know yet if Zac has put any of this into the book, but even if he hasn’t Mr Majestic is likely to be loads of fun. Look out for it.

Lekin...

There is much to enjoy in In the Company of a Poet, Nasreen Munni Kabir’s series of conversations (conducted mostly on Skype) with Gulzar. The poet/lyricist/filmmaker speaks at some length about his childhood, his writing career and his experiences in the movie industry, including his association with such personages as Bimal Roy, Meena Kumari and Hemant Kumar. But what stopped me in my tracks was when I read about Gulzar’s tennis-love. “You know, I play tennis every morning and the very thought of an Urdu poet wearing shorts and playing tennis goes against the grain,” he remarks at one point, “Ye Urdu ke shaayar hain aur subah ye knickers pahen ke kaise khelte hain?”

Shortly afterwards comes this poetic metaphor:

I wake up at five when it is still dark. I want the sun to look for me instead of my looking for the sun. Just as the first serve in tennis can be advantageous, so the first serve must be mine. The second goes to the sun.

And still later, this bit, which left me feeling not very gruntled.

I enjoy the way Federer plays. He is cool and has a gentle smile. The only thing I have against Nadal is the villainous grimaces he makes.

As a poet, Gulzarsaab should know that one may smile and smile and be a villain. Ah well. Just goes to show that it isn’t easy to be a creative genius AND a discerning sports fan. (In any case, Rafa chooses to serve second when he wins the toss. Everyone knows that.)

[Two pieces about my Nadal-fandom here and here]

Some links (and scattered thoughts on the darker side of sexuality)

In light of the Delhi gang-rape and its aftermath, here’s a round-up of some of the more interesting pieces I’ve been reading. But first, anyone who hasn’t yet watched this video of a superb, rousing talk by Kavita Krishnan, secretary of the All India Progressive Women’s Association, please do (English translation here).

- Peter Griffin’s “The Problem is Us”. An excellent but far from comforting post, a reminder that some attitudes are so deeply embedded in the social fabric that significant change can happen – if it does – only at a painfully slow rate.

- Amulya Gopalakrishnan makes a similar point: “We can try to change the assumptions of a rape culture, by making sure girls and boys grow up with healthier gender roles, by making sexuality less repressed and dark than it is. These are all long-haul projects, the patient task of families and schools, and less emotionally satisfying than attacking Manmohan Singh.”

Prayaag Akbar’s “Why you shouldn’t call Delhi our rape capital” – a reminder of the dangers of journalistic shorthand, and how it can constrict our understanding of important issues.

Deepanjana Pal’s “The Great Young Hopeless”, about the nature and implications of the rage being expressed. (“Gathering in a public place, shouting slogans, feeling that sense of fraternity and shared passion–it feels so much better than sitting at home as though trussed by invisible ropes.”)

Shuddhabrata Sengupta’s “To the young women and men of Delhi”, an impassioned call to action for the country’s youth, with a reminder of some of the cultural contexts surrounding rape in our society.

Nilanjana S Roy’s reporting of – and thoughts on – the protests at Raisina Hill: notes from day 1; photos from day 2; at the heart of Delhi, no space for you.

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And a personal note about something that might not seem too central to the larger issues being currently discussed. One thing that has puzzled me about many of the columns/online discussions I have read recently is the perfunctory repetition of the idea that rape only has to do with power or control; that it has nothing to do with sex. Now of course, there’s no denying that power/control/subjugation are key factors, especially in a feudal society deeply divided across caste and class lines, where rape is often used as “punishment” or to put someone “in their right place”. And there is no question that for the victim, rape is emphatically not a sexual act or anything close to it. (It’s a pity this even has to be said, but it does. Just read a few randomly picked lines from Tehelka’s exposé of police attitudes, in which cops confidently state that the woman was a willing participant in many case of sexual harassment.) But why this need to convince ourselves that this is also, always, the case for the rapist?

For example, the Sengupta piece I linked to above summarily states that “the rapist’s intention is not sexual pleasure”, and then goes on to frame “sexual pleasure” in the warmest, most idealistic terms (“the ONLY way in which pleasure can be had is through the reciprocity of desire, through love, through erotic engagement, not through taking away someone’s agency by force and without consent”). One understands his imperative: to define sex only in terms of consensual sex that brings happiness to both (or however many) participants – as something beautiful and life-affirming. But might this be a little misleading, and not fully cognisant of the different ways in which men (or some men) and women might experience sex? Personally I think this particular aspect of the issue is more pragmatically expressed by Samrat in his piece “The Urge to Rape”:

The male sexual urge does seem to operate in a different way than the female [...] The rapes are not necessarily done to demonstrate power [...] They are probably done because, take away the restraining hands of law, faith and social decorum, and the beasts that reside deep in men assert themselves in those whose internal checks are flawed. Such men then do what they feel the urge to do. It is a physical and psychological thing. And this is not to say “men will be men”, but to say “men can be animals”.

That last sentence is a very important one. Perhaps a good reason why so many well-meaning people over-stress the rape-is-not-about-sex theory is to avoid worsening a situation where blame is so often placed on women for dressing provocatively. (In India, this attitude is widespread among even educated, apparently cosmopolitan people.) Or to avoid implying that the “uncontrollable urges” of men make rape inevitable. But I don’t see why such conclusions have to follow from an upfront, unblinking look at the complexities and variances in human nature.

In this context, an excerpt from the “Gender” chapter of a favourite book, Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate:

I believe that the rape-is-not-about-sex doctrine [...] is preposterous on the face of it, does not deserve its sanctity, is contradicted by a mass of evidence, and is getting in the way of the only morally relevant goal surrounding rape, the effort to stamp it out.

Think about it. First obvious fact: Men often want to have sex with women who don’t want to have sex with them. They use every tactic that one human being uses to affect the behaviour of another: wooing, seducing, flattering, deceiving, sulking, and paying. Second obvious fact: Some men use violence to get what they want, indifferent to the suffering they cause [...] It would be an extraordinary fact, contradicting everything else we know about people, if some men didn’t use violence to get sex.

Pinker touches on Susan Brownmiller’s vital 1975 book Against our Will, which helped change (mostly for the better) many attitudes towards rape, but which also spread the idea that rape is “nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear”. Essentially, Brownmiller said that patriarchial structures and the resultant social conditioning were the cause of rape – that it had nothing to do with anything inherent in human nature. It is this notion that Pinker sets out to question, while also stressing that this does not in any way mean giving a criminal a green chit:

As for the morality of believing the not-sex theory, there is none. If we have to acknowledge that sexuality can be a source of conflict and not just wholesome mutual pleasure, we will have rediscovered a truth that observers of the human condition have noted throughout history. And if a man rapes for sex, that does not mean that he “just can’t help it” or that we have to excuse him, any more than we have to excuse the man who shoots the owner of a liquor store to raid the cash register...

For a much fuller understanding of Pinker's position and the positions he is arguing against, do read the whole chapter – and the book, if you can. (Note: there is also a Camille Paglia quote in there, which might raise the hackles of many people debating the issues around sexual violence. Paglia does stir pots quite vigorously, and I don’t think I’ve ever read anything by her without feeling a tinge of discomfort, even when I’ve agreed with her basic thesis. Some of her not-always-politically-correct views on rape are similarly discomforting.)

[Also see: this post by “a retired call girl” who, I imagine, knows a thing or three about the darker manifestations of sexuality]

Update: two more links that may be relevant: Rapists Explain Themselves and Live Through This.

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P.S. This is of course a very complex subject and I’m not trying to disentangle the issue of power/control from the issue of sexual gratification – just to suggest that the two things usually operate together, with one or the other being more dominant depending on the context. For instance, soldiers clinically using mass-rape as a “weapon” in wartime is a very different situation from a horny boy date-raping a girl after a certain amount of heavy-petting; but I'm inclined to think that the male sexual urge (however warped it might be, and however much it discomfits us to think of it as sexual) does play a – proportionally very small – part in the former case too.

Anyway, I'll be patronisingly chauvinistic now and give a woman the last word. After writing this post, I had an email exchange with Nilanjana about the subject, and here is some of what she said:

You only need to talk to rapists to recognise that both parts of the act of rape--the domination, and the sexual act itself--bring them great satisfaction. Bluntly, in that brutal gangrape, only the woman was raped. Her friend was beaten up, and under different circumstances, men have also raped men to assert their dominance--prison, police stations and war zones are often theatres for male rape--but that didn't happen here. Their focus in terms of sexual assault was the woman; their focus in terms of violent, non-sexual assault is the man. Brownmiller wrote her book in the late 1970s, after Serbia and Bosnia, and she had a key moment of recognition: rape was not an individual act, but far more often a collective assertion of power by groups of men. At that time, it was particularly important to recognise that women raped in war, for instance, were not being raped out of lust: they were being raped as an act of extreme violence, in line with other acts of violence.

[...]

Perhaps you have to contend with the idea that there are two kinds of what we call "rape". One, which Brownmiller and more recently Hudson and Den Boer speaks about, is rape used as a tool of power, as a way to assert caste, community, tribe or clan dominance. It is, in that sense, impersonal: any Dalit woman will do, any woman who steps out of line and "dishonours" the family can be used, any woman who is seen as property to be annexed will do as the object of rape. Often, in these cases, the rapists also have the tacit or open approval of the community, and will face no social censure or punitive action at all. Any lust the men feel is incidental to their role in these assaults, which is the role of the punisher, his authority sanctioned by the clan.

The other, and this has to be acknowledged, is an act of extreme sexual violence. It may have domination at its roots, but it also has pleasure, however ugly, as its goal.

[...]

Another thought: don't underestimate the rage and the deep anger that accompanies rape, often as powerful and as important as sexual pleasure. In many cases of "close friends and family" rape, the act is intended as a punishment in exactly the same way as it is in caste rapes and some war rapes. The punishment is meted out to the woman who's out of line, or who has strayed away from her (male) protector. I think we do talk far too much about sexual urges, and not enough about how a sense of righteous anger--or sometimes absolute open rage, how dare this woman be free?--is the driver. 

Mousie Tung and a Bodhi-catva guide to life

Being an old cynic who reckons that the best route to (irregular bursts of qualified) Happiness is to strive to be as discontented and stressed as possible, and to keep expectations at ocean-bed level, you may guess that I am not an enthusiastic reader of Inspirational or Self-Help books. This isn't to sweepingly judge the whole category, just to observe that too much of the literature in it offers quick-fix solutions or standardises the many possible human responses to a range of experiences. The sort of motivational book that might just stir my interest would be one that avoids a preachy, smug, all-knowing tone and offers its “wisdom” tentatively rather than burning it onto stone tablets. An even more effective method, though, would be to have it narrated by a cat.

This is what David Michie does in The Dalai Lama’s Cat, which I read in a single, pleasant sitting yesterday. The premise is a straightforward one. A frail kitten is bought – rescued, really – by the Dalai Lama at a traffic signal on the outskirts of Delhi and taken to Mcleodganj, where she soon settles into the temple complex and becomes known as HHC (His Holiness’s Cat). Much of her time is spent in the company of the Buddhist leader himself, soaking in his presence (“had he recognised in me a kindred spirit – a sentient being on the same spiritual wavelength as he?”) – she listens as the Dalai Lama and his associates and helpers discuss various conundrums of existence. But she also explores the world, finding a second home in a cafe in the little marketplace outside the monastery, as well as romance with a local tabby.

Through all this, no real attempt is made to convincingly flesh out the feline world (as in The Wildings, for example) – The Dalai Lama's Cat is not that kind of animal book. HHC – alternately known as Rinpoche, Snow Lion and, much to her dismay, “Mousie-Tung” – is our medium for a range of life-lessons: each chapter follows a broad format where a human character deals with a realisation about his life and attitude, and the cat then tries to apply some of these teachings to her own experiences, with varying degrees of success. (“You may have imagined that we cats never get caught up in such cognitive complexity ... nothing could be further from the truth.”) Thus, an insight about how self-absorption can make one sick and unhappy is linked to our narrator coughing up unpleasant fur balls after spending an inordinate amount of time grooming herself. She realises that a period of self-pity combined with fear of exploring a new setting cost her precious time that she might have spent getting to know a new friend; she reflects on the importance of mindfulness – paying full attention to whatever one is doing in the present moment, rather than allowing a disconnect between action and thought; and she is even inspired to deal with her gluttony, a by-product of being pampered silly both inside and outside the temple complex.

I’m still undecided about this book’s “inspiration quotient" – some of the ideas are nicely expressed, others come close to sounding like platitudes – but one thing The Dalai Lama’s Cat manages to do (given the assumptions of its genre) is to not get over-sentimental. Cat nature ensures the retention of dignity, and a certain aloofness, even in life-changing moments. At one point HHC overcomes her feelings of envy for a new arrival, a dog named Kyi Kyi, when she learns about his sad back-story. “We reached an understanding of sorts,” she says, but quickly adds: “I did not, however, climb into his basket and let him lick my face. I’m not that kind of cat. And this is not that kind of book.”

P.S. Tangentially relevant to this post is the marvellous YouTube video below. Do watch. These three minutes represent the most convincing argument for religion that I’ve yet come across.

On Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Anuradha (and Leela Naidu on inflatable bras and excessive makeup)

Pandit Ravi Shankar’s death last week gave me an excuse to dust off a DVD of an old film he had scored for – Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Anuradha, about a woman who sacrifices her singing career to move to the village with her doctor husband, and comes to feel marginalised and stifled. It’s a lovely film, one of our cinema’s best depictions of threatened individuality and a marriage under pressure, highlighted by good pacing, a subtly mournful score and excellent acting: Leela Naidu shows sensitivity beyond her years in the title role (she was barely 20 at the time) and Balraj Sahni – though a little too old for his part – brings his trademark understatement to the role of Anuradha’s well-meaning but neglectful husband, Dr Nirmal.

In conjunction, their performances make this an emotionally complex experience, because it is very difficult to “take sides” between the two characters. And it is notable that Anuradha maintains this delicate balance, especially given what we know of the larger world around those people. This was one of a number of 1950s and early 60s films set against the backdrop of a young, forward-looking nation-state undergoing necessary social and economic development. Understandably, these films extolled the importance of such professionals as doctors and engineers, who were the architects of that development, and Nirmal is one of them: early during their courtship, he tells Anuradha that when he was a child his mother died of a routine illness, not because the family was too poor to afford treatment but because there was no doctor for miles around.

Given this story, the societal and national background and the fact that Nirmal is throughout presented as a sensitive, dedicated man, it is hard for a viewer to pass judgement on his shortcomings as a husband. Working long hours in the village, constructing makeshift equipment, teaching himself by studying books (which no doubt further eats into his personal time), he still manages to be a good father, taking his little girl on his rounds and subtly imparting life-lessons to her along the way. Late in the film, when a visiting city doctor exults “Shahar se door, ek gaon mein – aisa doctor!” (“Such a fine doctor in a village so far from the city!”), it becomes almost a celebration of the developmental possibilities in a young republic.

In such a context, what hope for poor Anuradha and her art? How can her music (even if it is composed by Ravi Shankar, and even if her playback singing is done by Lata Mangeshkar!) possibly compete with the urgency of her husband’s work? The conflict as presented here is not just one of equality between a woman and a man in a marriage – it is a clash between the dedication of a doctor trading in life and death, doing everything he can for a community, and the desire of a bored housewife for self-actualisation (in a field where she might bring pleasure to people – mostly privileged people – through her musical performances, but not achieve anything comparable to the social significance of Nirmal's work). 

At times, the film seems clear about what responses it expects from us. Nirmal and Anuradha’s shift to the village is idealised. When the urbanite Deepak, who Anuradha’s father had wanted her to marry, is reintroduced into the story (he is about to shake up her life by reminding her that she can still follow her dreams: “Sona chaahe barson se mitti mein pada rahe, sona hee rahta hai”), he is in a fancy car with loud music playing in it – a contrast to the quiet, dignified tone of the film so far. (Deepak is a good man, but in this situation he is also a threat to social order, and is presented as such.) There is also a faintly patronising tone in the (well-intended) scene where an elderly visitor extols Anuradha’s capacity for saadhna and tapasya and sings paeans to women (“our daughters, sisters, mothers”) who are making sacrifices for the larger benefit of humankind. (Nazir Hussain’s performance in this supporting role is a more sympathetic pre-echo of his ridiculous Colonel Sahab in the Waheeda Rehman-starrer Khamoshi, about which more here.) In other words: worship the “goddesses” who facilitate the smooth functioning of a society, but also take it as a given that this can happen only so long as they stay in their proper place – the home – and serve as support staff rather than as active participants.

And yet, even as the cards appear heavily stacked against Anuradha and her personal interests, the film manages to never make her seem selfish or less than deserving of sympathy. This is largely achieved through the very nuanced performances, but also through an increasingly complex narrative structure. On paper there might seem a clear divide between the wealthy, vaguely foppish Deepak and the noble village doctor Nirmal, but the film doesn’t encourage cliched attitudes to these characters. The visual design of the song “Kaise Din Beete” tells its own story: as Anuradha sings, the man who is paying rapt attention, giving her the respect and consideration she needs, is the interloper who might, in a more conventional narrative, be the “villain” – and the man immersed in his medical journal, treating her as a tolerable distraction, is our hero, her husband. Watching Nirmal’s forced efforts to show interest in Anuradha’s singing, his eventual getting up and leaving the room (and her eyes following him around, barely even registering her admirer sitting in the other corner), one gets an immediate sense of how her personal confidence must have eroded over the 10 years of their marriage (even if it has in some respects been a successful one, complete with a well-loved and well-brought-up child). There is even a shot where we see Anuradha as she is now, reflected in a photo of a happier time, where she is posing with her singing trophies.

One aspect of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s cinema that is relatively less commented on is his careful, considerate handling of a spectrum of romantic relationships, from the heady thrill of young love to the more measured affection between a couple who have grown old together. (The delightful Rang Birangi is one film that weaves threads from a number of such relationships – in various stages of understanding and misunderstanding – into its tapestry.) Anuradha has a short comic track featuring Mukri as a villager named Atmaram with a constantly ailing spouse (who we never see) – he feels all her aches and pains, so that when Dr Nirmal meets him on the road and sees him limping, he knows that Atmaram’s wife must have injured her leg. This buffoon’s pathological bond with his wife’s medical condition is milked for humour, but it is by no means irrelevant to the film’s larger themes. With hindsight, we can see that if Atmaram represents empathy taken to surreal extremes, the generally admirable Nirmal is sometimes close to the other extreme in his indifference to Anuradha’s needs.

But he does eventually acknowledge this, and the film – almost in spite of its own long-term, big-picture view of things – moves towards an ending where the possibility of genuine understanding in the relationship arises; this is very sensitively done through a series of events culminating in a cross-cutting sequence where Nirmal realises how empty his life would be without Anuradha, and she simultaneously arrives at a realisation of her own. Meanwhile, sitting in his car outside the house, Deepak smiles ruefully and drives away in the last shot (and it occurs to me that Abhi Bhattacharya, who plays Deepak, also played Krishna in the 1965 film version of the Mahabharata. Perhaps Deepak’s place in the Anuradha narrative is akin to that of the natkhat facilitator, contriving away knowingly so that a “happy ending” may be reached. There was certainly no shortage of Krishna figures in Mukherjee’s later cinema).


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A postscript: Made in the Bimal Roy tradition, Anuradha is the sort of gentle film that is easy to hold up as a representation of an idealised era where people conducted themselves with more dignity than they do today. By association, this idea goes with the one that the film industry of that period was consistently higher-minded than it now is – more concerned with crafting grounded, meaningful movies than in being commercial or catering to the “lowest common denominator”. There may be a vestige of truth in this notion when one is assessing the work of directors such as Mukherjee or Roy, but it’s also true that our minds are hard-wired to think of the past as glorious and idyllic, and the present as bleak and corrupted, and that this infects our view of film history. (It helps explain, for instance, why people of all ages are convinced that the songs of an earlier time were more melodious, and that today’s film music is nothing but shrill cacophony. But more on this and related Golden Ageism in another post.)

Shortly after watching Anuradha, I flipped through the relevant sections of Leela Naidu’s feisty memoir Leela: A Patchwork Life (co-written with Jerry Pinto) and found that the industry she describes (one that she was well-placed to look at dispassionately, being an outsider to the Indian film world) doesn’t seem hugely dissimilar from the industry of today. Naidu’s account begins with an anecdote about an assistant director sending her three brassieres with little nozzles for the purpose of inflating them to the required size (and her own amused speculation that she might come out of her dressing room and be told, “No Madamji, in this film you are a 38B cup, remember?”). Later, she refuses to wear makeup that would be too loud for a young woman living in a village (“Why is the bridge of my nose yellow and my nostrils blue?” I asked) – not at all surprising if one has seen Anuradha and noted the tacky scene in which an accident victim’s face is randomly splattered with dark paint.

Naidu also caused consternation on the set when she displayed “communist” tendencies by refusing to sit down until chairs were arranged for “extras”; and she fended off a subtle advance made by Balraj Sahni (“a perfect gentleman...but like many other perfect gentlemen, he was not above trying his luck”). Relating stories from other films she made around the same time, she observes that even a fine, professional actor like Ashok Kumar would show up on the set – for one of three “shifts” in his working day – and have to be told the title of the film and the name of the character he was playing. Or that producers were not above capitalising on a tragic real-life incident such as the Nanavati murder case. None of this is to suggest that all the people who made beautiful movies in the past were cynical hypocrites looking out only for their own profit. But it is a reminder that the old films that we canonise were, to varying degrees, part of a practical, commercial tradition – and that our notions about the innocent “simplicity” of the past can be, well, simplistic and innocent.

Beti aur bus

Thinking – in light of the latest Delhi gang-rape – about the many subtle ways in which misogyny is perpetuated and absorbed into a culture, I remembered a passage I recently read in an interview of the filmmaker Onir (this is from Anna MM Vetticad’s book Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic, which I reviewed here). The back-story is that Onir’s sensitive film I Am had run into censorship problems simply for touching on such subjects as child abuse and homosexuality. Here he is on the double standards in what is seen as acceptable for a mass audience and what isn’t:

Recently I was watching this so-called, feel-good, keep-your-brains-at-home, fun big film, and I was thinking that I’m facing so much trouble with the Censor Board over I Am, yet in this film I was watching, the Board cleared a scene in which a young boy is crying and the mother says: “Maine toh beta maanga tha, beti mil gayee.” (“I asked for a son, but got a daughter instead.”) In a country like India, you pass that uncensored?

Cut to the next dialogue, friend explaining the art of how to get the right person in your life: “Har ladki ek bus ki tarah hoti hai. Chadh jaao, utar jaao, chadh jaao, uttar jaao. Ek toh aisa bus hai jo ghar le jaayega, ussko miss mat karo.” (“Girls are like buses. Get on, get off, get on, get off. Just make sure you don’t miss that one bus that gets you home.”) I wanted to throw up. And this gets a U certificate?

I think it's safe to assume that both scenes Onir mentions above were played for laughs, and that they probably did draw unthinking chuckles from a large number of the people who watched them. But even if it was a “keep-your-brains-at-home” film, such dialogue has a way of creeping, meme-like, into the reptile brains of some of those viewers and informing - or confirming - their worldviews. Perhaps we should expect nothing less in a country where senior members of a Censor Board (apparently educated men and women among them) dole U-certificates to such scenes even as they excise a mere hint of consensual gay sex on the grounds that “Oh my God, the look between those two men will make viewers uncomfortable.”

Cinema session at the Apeejay Kolkata lit-fest

Having just been rude about literature festivals in a column, I attempt to make amends with this early shout-out for the Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival (January 9-13). The website is here - it hasn't been updated yet but the schedule of events will be up in a couple of days. I’m moderating a session titled "Transgressions: Essaying the New in Indian Film" on the morning of January 10 (Shyam Benegal and others will be on the panel), so if you’re interested and in/around Kolkata at the time, do drop in.

(Here is a PDF of the festival's press release, with more information.)

Exactly six months today...

...since Foxie went. Hard to believe. Life has been a very strange, dense haze since then, and about the only thing that has kept me sane (to whatever extent it has) is the writing and the long walks. Everything else has been a blur.

I have been defensive about writing too much about this in a public space (most of the thousands of words I have written about Fox in the past few months have been for myself) or even speaking about it with “friends”. But I do feel the need to put this down for my little girl without letting self-consciousness/awkwardness get in the way: no power on earth will convince me that what I have been feeling every day in the last few months is qualitatively different from what the parents of a human child would feel in the same situation. This has been a life-altering time in ways that I’m not close to being able to fully process or understand yet.

There, I said it (and if it sounds like grief porn, so be it). Do I feel better? Yes, and it may even last for a few minutes.

Quiet surfaces, fissured lives in Annie Zaidi's Love Stories #1 to 14

[A version of this review appeared in the Sunday Guardian]

So warm and attentive is the writing in Annie Zaidi’s new short-story collection that it comes as a little shock when you think about what some of her characters are really going through. This book’s tone is consistently hushed, reflective, shorn of hysteria – even in a description of two people arguing, with a lifetime of companionship on the line – but beneath its still surfaces lies much emotional turbulence.

You sense this when you learn that a middle-aged woman has been taking the 8.22 train to her office even though it means a difficult commute, because she has become deeply attached to the voice of the announcer for that train (she has never seen him, but constantly imagines and re-imagines what he must look like). Or reading about the chill felt by a man alone on a beach (“the very sand seemed to turn cold at his approach”) as he watches couples walking around, a cluster of shells looking to him like “abandoned homes, tombstones without memory”. Or when a young girl ponders the meaning of the term “love child” and likens her father, returned after a long absence, to a wedding guest who isn’t particularly close to either bride or groom. (“They feel no anxiety, no envy, no real curiosity. They just sit by themselves, smile abstractly, eat and are content to have been invited.”) The tumult even cuts through the mildly comical tone of a story titled “The One that Came Limping Back”, in which a woman, after breaking off her engagement, travels in a haze from town to town while her befuddled mother pores over an atlas.

These 14 stories are about people in various stages of longing – whether framed by an actual, present relationship, or a remembered or illusory one, or one that never quite tips over into a conventional romance – and they deliver kaleidoscopic views of love and its effects. Thus, “The One that Badly Wanted” has a girl being fixated on a boy she never summons the courage to talk to, and later attempting to remake a boyfriend in the image of a dead man; the story’s final sentence is a reminder that what sometimes gets called love can be a selfish, or at least a self-replenishing, emotion. A subtler feeling stirs in “The One from Radheshyam (B) Cooperative Housing Society” when a middle-aged painter is moved by the solicitousness of an old man who she initially feared was stalking her (later, falling into a hesitant, self-conscious friendship, “they spoke staccato, like engines in very old cars”). And one of my favourite stories – the compact, skilfully constructed “The One that Climbed out of a Bucket” – has a woman experiencing a rush of memories at a most unexpected time. As she watches a gecko trapped in a bucket during her bath, one thought segues into another: she goes from reflecting on the absurdity of a typical Hindi-film scene, to thinking about cleaning the spots where the lizard has been, to recalling her own illicit presence in an ex-boyfriend’s life and house.

Elsewhere, there is the underlying knowledge that love as an ideal can be more powerful and seductive than the real thing. A man whose wife was once a narcotics addict frets that since he never knew the things she had struggled against, perhaps he didn’t really know her. A woman wonders what might happen if her husband showed up one night and “his smile wasn’t real”, a married couple finds that their eyes “no longer dance around each other”, a conversation between former lovers seems at first calm and measured, but tension builds as we realise that the two people are not carrying the same weight of emotional baggage; that one of them is more damaged than the other.

Most of these narratives are in the subjective third person, with perspectives sometimes shifting within a story, and none of the characters are named. The recurrent use of “she” and “he” might have become precious, but it works because of the universality of the feelings involved. In any case, what really matters is what is going on in these people’s inner spaces, how they are dealing with distress or elation or hopefulness; conferring superficial identities on them seems almost unnecessary. (Or even counter-productive: in “The One that was Fulfilled”, the arguments between a husband and wife run together in a single long, stream-of-consciousness paragraph, with no quote-marks or breaks to separate who is saying what, so that the effect is unnervingly like that of a single personality in conflict with itself.)

The one anomaly, I thought, was the last story, “The One that Stepped off a Broken-down Bus”, which can be viewed as a sort of summarising coda for the book. Here, two sensitive young people meet on a bus, tease each other for a bit and then discuss the complexities of love: what being connected to another life really means, what it means at different ages, practicality versus spontaneity, and so on. The story is readable enough on its own terms, but for me its weight of expository talk went against the subtler mood established by the earlier stories. That mood hinges on things being revealed through delicate observations of human behaviour in specific situations, so that – for example – a husband perplexed by his wife’s aloofness might be described thus: “He was a steady sort. He could outlast his woman’s moods, he told himself. There was the question of zero sex. But he was a patient man. He would not look at another woman. Well, perhaps he would look. But he was careful not to be caught looking. Sex, anyway, was just sex. True, it wasn’t healthy to go without for too long. But what man cheated on his wife on health grounds? He was stern with himself.”

Apart from the psychological acuity of such passages and their sense of a character’s interiority, they also let us see how, given time and a worsening state of affairs, a well-meaning person might cross a line. Consistently clear-sighted about love and its attendant frailties and pitfalls, these stories suggest many possible futures awaiting these people – so that even one that closes with “I love you, I always did, I always will” (the nearest thing the book has to a cheesy romantic declaration, spoken, ironically, by a woman who dislikes cheese) doesn’t invite the reader to take a fairy-tale ending for granted; it carries a sense that the relationship constantly needs to be worked on, that more ruptures may lie ahead. The marvel of this book is that this clear-sightedness – which could so easily have become bleak or cynical – goes hand in hand with genuine tenderness and empathy.

Moth grass film living: on watching Stan Brakhage's cinema bizarro

“Alternate cinema” or “experimental cinema” are conditional terms, one man’s “alternate” often being another man’s “practically mainstream”. (Some feedback I got for this story said that the people profiled weren't non-mainstream enough.) But there are some filmmakers whose position on the scale is beyond argument, and one of them is the American Stan Brakhage, whose work I have recently been watching with a mix of trepidation, fascination and (on occasion) despair.

Brakhage, who made well over 300 films (most of them under 10 minutes long), is routinely described as an avant-garde, non-narrative director, but that doesn’t begin to convey some of the things he did – how he set out to overturn conventional ideas about how a film should be watched, and even what a film is. To take just one example, his three-minute-long “Mothlight” was not made by recording things with a camera; it was created by manually sticking grass, stems, petals and dozens of moth wings (from insects that had burnt to death by flying towards candles) between two strips of clear film and then running the thing through an optical printer. That may seem a random, self-indulgent thing to do (and indeed, “self-indulgent” is a lazily accurate way of describing much of Brakhage’s work), but he put into the process all the care and thought of a painter adorning an immensely long canvas – he wanted a very specific effect on the screen when the film would be projected at 24 frames per second.

I settled down to watch “Mothlight” (and a few other Brakhage films, including the similarly constructed “The Garden of Earthly Delights”) with only very basic background information, but I did read Fred Camper’s notes on how to ideally watch a Brakhage film. “Try to approximate the conditions of a cinema as much as possible,” Camper writes, “One should sit fairly close to, and perhaps at eye level with or even lower than, the screen. The projected film image has, in its clarity and colours and light, a kind of iconic power that is key to Brakhage’s work, and it’s important to try to see whatever monitor one is viewing these films on in a similar way.” He points out that Brakhage made most of his films silent because “visual rhythms are crucial to his work” – and so, it’s important, while viewing them, not to be interrupted by talk, the phone ringing, and other distracting sounds nearby.

Feeling very much like a student going through pre-examination rituals, I darkened my room, sat on the ground at a distance of around three feet from my 36-inch plasma screen and reached for my notebook – before realising how idiotic it is to try and scribble notes while watching a three-minute movie made up of hundreds of subliminal images, none of which is on screen for more than a fraction of a second. (You have to see the whole thing through, then try – with hindsight – to make sense of the experience in words. Perhaps see it a second and third time. And resist the impulse to keep pausing frames.)

Watching, it became obvious why this eerie, hypnotic film would lose much of its effect if seen on (say) a computer screen with many visual and aural distractions around. Trying to describe the experience is daunting. The first images are extreme close-ups of translucent brown objects: if you know the back-story, you can tell that these are moth wings, but even with no prior information it is soon possible to guess that the many dark shapes flickering on and off the screen represent insect forms and motifs. Shades of brown give way to splotches of green - for the odd second or two you can see reasonably vivid images of stems and grass, their green almost filling the screen. The rhythms of the images change constantly: at times they rush by (appearing to race at the camera, like moths hurtling towards a light) so fast you feel breathless and disoriented; at other times you can make out identifiable patterns (mainly leaves) that merge into each other, and this can be reassuring.

What is the purpose of all this? Some viewers might say it is a form of visual gibberish. After a first viewing I felt that way too, but watching the film a further three or four times – having become more accustomed to its weirdness of form – I found it strangely moving. Unfolding on the screen is an impression of relentless organic activity (and it is identifiably organic, even though there isn’t a single held shot of a whole insect or plant). “Mothlight” may be constructed entirely of dead matter coldly pressed between film strips, but the projection and the speed gives these elements a dazzling, otherworldly life, and the extreme close-ups can even create the illusion that the veins in the insects' wings are pulsing with blood. Besides, if the human mind is incapable of making precise, ordered sense of what is happening on the screen, well, that’s only appropriate: how many of us know what a moth’s life or a leaf's life is like?

(Yes, that probably sounds like a cop-out - in the sense that one can probably make a similar observation about ANY random jumble of images - but I'm being honest about my impressions and how they changed over a few viewings. And I have no problem admitting that I found at least a couple of Brakhage's other films utterly incomprehensible or boring or both.)

Another of Brakhage’s best-known works, “Window Water Baby Moving” – an 11-minute filming of the birth of his first child – is more explicitly about the creation and emergence of life; it’s a lush, lyrical film, and more narrative-driven. (The plot being: “A baby is born.”) But I thought “Mothlight” was equally poignant in its own way. When the dead moths and the dead flora dance on the screen for those few minutes, it is a testament to the regenerating power of film (very old movies are, after all, made up of long-dead people brought achingly alive in front of our eyes). I was also  reminded of those beautiful six or seven seconds in Chris Marker’s short film La jetée (made almost entirely of still images) when we see movement for the only time: a woman waking and looking straight at the camera, “coming alive” for a few precious moments.

[Will be watching a few more Brakhage films soon - but not TOO soon. First, Ek tha Tiger and Khiladi 786]

Notes on Suniti Namjoshi and The Fabulous Feminist

In her short Introduction to a section of the just-published The Fabulous Feminist: A Suniti Namjoshi Reader, Namjoshi writes:

It’s true the fable is a didactic form, but I don’t sit down and say, “I am now going to write a fable making this point or pointing to that moral.” More often than not – for me anyway – a fable starts with an image. The creature looking out is so eloquent that the fable begins to write itself. And once the creature starts to speak, the fable develops its own logic. The conventions of the traditional storytelling form and its powerful rhythm generate a momentum...

For a good example of what she means, consider her little story “Lost Species”, which was inspired by a Henri Rousseau painting of two unidentifiable beasts peering out of a jungle. They must be poets, Namjoshi thought when she saw the painting, and went on to write her piece about a naturalist coming across a tribe of exotic creatures (“they looked a bit like rabbits and a bit like piglets, but they might have been apes or possibly hyenas”) and wondering what they were good for. “Is your flesh good to eat?” he asks them, and “Is your fur warm?” and other such questions. Eventually they tell him that they are poets and do nothing useful, so he returns disappointed.

Not having read Namjoshi before, this collection has been a good introduction to her work, and I’ve particularly being enjoying the extracts from her 1981 book Feminist Fables and from Saint Suniti and the Dragon. These fables (most of them under a page long) are sharp inversions or re-workings of folktales and myths, done to emphasise the workings of social dominance and to sometimes facilitate small victories for underdogs. Inevitably, then, much of their content is didactic, but it is also very entertaining – Namjoshi compresses a lot of irony or sarcasm into a few pithy lines. In one fable a Brahmin who wanted a son is given a daughter instead. “Though only a woman, she was a Brahmin, so she learned very fast, and then they both sat down and meditated hard.” (Of course, the father’s purpose in meditating is to ask again for a son, and Vishnu grants him this wish but not quite in the way he had expected.) In another story a woman who is all Heart spends her life serving others wholeheartedly but when she goes to the government to ask for a pension she doesn’t get it. (“The problem was that she had no head and couldn’t ask.”) In a Beauty and the Beast retelling, the lovelorn Beast is not a nobleman but a lesbian; since the books she reads make it clear that men love women and women love men, she decides that she can’t be human. Questions of what is socially permissible are discussed elsewhere too. “A plant with feet is not natural,” says the mother of a plant (or a human girl?) that has had the temerity to pull out its roots and prance about, instead of remaining a docile little shrub.

Namjoshi’s original manuscript title for Feminist Fables was “The Monkey and the Crocodiles”, and I can see why; the story by that name is one of her most representative works. In it, a monkey who has grown up with two crocodile friends near a riverbank decides she wants to explore the world, or at least to follow the river to its source. The crocs try to warn her of malignant beasts that are “long and narrow with scaly hides and powerful jaws”, but the monkey goes anyway and returns years later, having lost her tail, six teeth and an eye. “Did you encounter the beasts?” her friends ask, “What did they look like?”

“They looked like you,” she answered slowly. “When you warned me long ago, did you know that?”

“Yes,” said her friends, and avoided her eye.

The story can be seen as a straightforward allegory for parents warning a daughter of a world populated by other humans who could turn out to be predators. (When the crocodiles describe the “dangerous beasts”, the monkey is bemused – understandably, for the only creatures she knows who look like that are her friends; to her there is nothing intrinsically threatening about the description.) But as Namjoshi has pointed out herself, most of her fables can be read not just as being about gender discrimination but in terms of any power imbalance. “It’s not possible to grow up in India without seeing the different kinds of disparities in power all around unless, of course, we choose to blind ourselves deliberately... But to vie with one another about which kind of oppression is the most oppressive is, in my opinion, a bad mistake.”

Incidentally the one-eyed monkey, having survived the world, reappears in some of Namjoshi’s subsequent writings, such as “The One-Eyed Monkey Goes into Print”, a droll account of her own experience of getting published. The monkey is variously told by publishers that her book needs more human interest, that it is lacking in clarity ("the vision is monocular") and could she help pay for the printing?

In the end the book achieved a moderate success under the title The Amorous Adventures of a One-Eyed Minx. “Is it autobiographical?” the reviewers wondered. “No,” declared the monkey quite truthfully, “I do not recognise myself in it.” But her publishers beamed. They patted her back. “Art transforms,” they murmured kindly.

Now doesn't that sound like a fable about the encouragement of bland homogeneity in a process that should open windows to new worlds?

(More on The Fabulous Feminist soon. Meanwhile do look out for the book, especially since much of Namjoshi’s earlier work appears to be out of print these days)

On Awtar Krishna Kaul's 27 Down (and a cinematic “what if”)

Now up on that fine website The Big Indian Picture, a piece I wrote about the 1973 film 27 Down, the only feature directed by the talented Awtar Krishna Kaul, who died tragically just before the film was released.

A favourite parlour game for the nerdish movie buff is the contemplation of great cinematic years. Internationally, obvious frontrunners include 1939 – when a breathtaking number of high-quality films competed for hall space before the disruptive theatre of WWII took over – and 1959-60, when at least half a dozen countries seemed to have New Waves in progress and such varied directors as Jean-Luc Godard, Kon Ichikawa, Otto Preminger and Georges Franju made magnificent films. But looking at Hindi cinema through the lens of hindsight, it seems to me that something special was in the air in 1973...

[Read the full piece here]

Dead writers' society: on Howard Jacobson's Zoo Time

In another few days, every town and street corner will be hosting a Big Literature Festival. It is natural then, around this time of year, to hear murmurings about smug, back-patting, liquor-guzzling intellectuals. Along with some less-than-tasteful suggestions: it may be remarked, for instance, that a giant Godzilla foot squelching down on the Jaipur festival lawns on a weekend evening would wipe out our literary community in one swell foop. But notably, most such comments come from insiders themselves and therefore have a certain amount of wistful self-loathing built into them – the last time I heard the Godzilla one, it was said at Jaipur on a weekend evening, and by someone who is himself sometimes regarded as being part of this putative “community”. (He, of course, denies it vigorously. He also denies being the present writer.)

Creatively executed, such self-commentaries – litterateurs sniffing or whining about litterateurs – can be a form of meta-fiction, and meta-fiction is all the rage these days. Much contemporary literature is explicitly about writers and writing, giving the impression that the Novel is not so much dead as trapped in a giant hall of mirrors. Self-reflexive writing of this sort can become tedious (witness the present column), but heading into December I found it almost comforting to read Howard Jacobson’s new novel Zoo Time, with its comically apocalyptic vision of the publishing world – a vision that almost makes our lit-fest and book-launch season seem stable and sane.

Here are some of the things that happen in Zoo Time’s hysterical universe. A publisher shoots himself in the mouth shortly after a meal with an author (during which they talked about a literary world forever altered by Twitter, blogs and vampire-replete bestsellers). Terrified agents lock themselves in lavatories “rather than have a manuscript handed to them personally like a subpoena”, and one of them is lost on the Hindu Kush with a manuscript in his backpack. (“Had Quinton lost his bearings and gone stumbling through the ice with my manuscript wrapped around him for insulation, or had the novel itself sent him mad? The question, to tell the truth, wasn’t much discussed. A literary agent going missing was much too common an occurrence to attract speculation.”) The marriage of the book’s narrator – Guy Ableman, author of a novel titled “Who Gives a Monkey’s?” – is in trouble, partly because the sound of his writing drives his wife to madness. (“But so did the sound of my not writing.”)

In this strangely familiar dystopia, literary parties are like funeral wakes (“except that at a wake there’d have been more to drink, and fuller sandwiches”) and a car exhaust backfiring might cause passersby to wonder if another publisher had taken his life within their earshot. The few remaining readers quiver with rage whenever they meet a writer (“was it because reading as a civilised activity was over that the last people doing it were reduced to such fury? Was this the final paroxysm before expiry?”) and are actively hostile in their dissection of his “berk” (no one says “book” anymore, it's too much effort). The best chance a young author has of producing a hit is to write a memoir about losing his sight when his adoptive mother’s silicone breasts exploded in his face.

Beyond all these things, Zoo Time’s threadbare “plot” is about the deep attraction Ableman feels for his wife’s mother Poppy, but he uses a literary analogy to describe even this: is sleeping with your mother-in-law like stealing your own book? Throughout, he is a self-conscious wordsmith in the act of constructing his own story, correcting himself mid-sentence, giving us glimpses – whether reliable or not – of how his real life intersects with his fiction. And in doing this, Jacobson’s novel asks that pertinent question: should a writer exist (for the reader) beyond the page? It is a question that was raised memorably in Jaipur two years ago, when J M Coetzee – among the last of the truly taciturn big-name authors – read a long extract from his work but didn’t otherwise say a word. Jacobson may or may not have had Coetzee in mind when he writes about a Nobel-winning Dutch author who simply sat on the stage in front of his festival audience: “So the hour would have passed, each staring at the other in silence, had someone not thought of showing slides of the bridges of Amsterdam. When it was over they gave him a standing ovation.”

Zoo Time is among the most tongue-in-cheek doomsday books I have read. It is about the long-awaited demise of writing and reading (and therefore about the end of everything, since it is narrated by a man obsessed with these things), but it is also a reminder that good meta-fiction can help keep literature alive in the very process of sounding its death-knell. If writers absolutely have to write solipsistic books about writing (and really, one wishes they wouldn’t), this is a fine way to do it. I do hope though that Jacobson is careful in choosing what passages to read at his (no doubt many) impending appearances in clubby literary festivals.

Perhaps the one that begins thus?

This is when you know you’re in deep shit as a writer – when the heroes of your novels are novelists worrying that the heroes of their novels are novelists who know they’re in deep shit... 

[Did a version of this for Business Standard's Eye Culture column]

New directions, new treatments (notes on some 2012 movies)

[Did this round-up piece for Democratic World magazine – a look at how some of the better Hindi films of the past year dealt with complexities of life in India]

There is a brief moment in one of the best Hindi films of 2012, Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Paan Singh Tomar, that almost cries out for subtextual analysis. The title character – once an upbeat army man and athlete proudly serving his country, but now a baaghi driven to a life outside the law – is nearing the end of his personal race. This section of the story is set in 1980, and on a transistor belonging to the policemen pursuing Paan Singh we hear a news item about the death of the actress Nargis. Given the film’s larger themes, it is reasonable to wonder if this scene is an allusion to Nargis’s most famous role: does it reflect the end of the Mother India ideal for the film’s embittered protagonist?

If so, it would be in keeping with this film’s subtle, plaintive tone. Though Paan Singh Tomar is based on a real-life tale that has the resonance of a Shakespearean tragedy, it doesn’t strain self-consciously to be one. It consistently stays in the moment, and even scenes such as the one where our hero remarks that apart from the Army everyone in the country is a thief, or the one where he says “Desh ke liye faltu bhaage hum?” when a policeman tosses his medals away, are handled with understatement – not least thanks to Irfan Khan’s brilliantly measured performance.
 
Our storytelling registers have been changing in small ways. Though mainstream Hindi cinema has always had narratives about the disaffection of the wronged individual with the System, they tended to be presented in highly dramatic terms, accompanied by flashes of lightning and over-expository declaiming. In contrast, some of the better, more provocative Hindi films of 2012 have treated such subjects as patriotism, national integration and the Idea of India with restraint as well as imagination.
 
If Dhulia’s film tells the story of an individual and his times, the claustrophobic gloom of Dibakar Banerjee’s Shanghai gives expression to a number of different stories – adding up to a tightly knit comment on the aspirations and power struggles that brush against each other in a many-tiered society. (The film’s protagonists include a lower-class man who fantasises about a job where he might one day get to wear a tie as well as a privileged man in a high-profile job who loosens his own tie every opportunity he gets; there are other such polarities and contrasts in the story too.) In some ways, Shanghai is a very “non-Bollywood” film. It has the self-consciously stygian look of a contemporary noir movie – it even makes Mumbai’s busy nightlife seem sinister in a way that has rarely been achieved in our cinema before. And it is adapted from a Greek novel, Z, which was about a very specific political context. But Banerjee and his co-writer Urmi Juvekar did a thoughtful job of fitting it to the contemporary Indian situation, depicting a world where where underprivileged people unwittingly participate in their own exploitation, and the rich indulge the hubris of yanking the country into the First World without looking at its ground realities.

Trying to keep your equilibrium, turning your face away from injustice until your conscience no longer lets you, and then realising that none of it may matter anyway...these are repeated motifs here. At the film's end the bureaucrat Krishnan (played by Abhay Deol) does something that in a more simple-minded story might have resulted in the summary cleaning up of the political order, but here we see that nothing has really changed. So, is Shanghai a cynical film? There is no easy answer. Banerjee himself sees it as an ode to individual conscience in a harsh world, while Juvekar told me during a recent conversation that they didn’t want to tie up loose ends and give the audience any false comfort. No wonder the film, even as it was widely acclaimed, left so many viewers with an uncomfortable, unresolved feeling.

Some other major films don’t deal explicitly with “national issues”, but they do reflect an increasing willingness by Bollywood to visit places that are not often charted by Hindi cinema. The authenticity of the hinterland depiction in Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur has been called into question, but there is no doubting the film’s ability to establish the mood of a particular setting, and to reexamine stereotypes; while the bulk of the action is in Dhanbad, there are also two scenes set in Varanasi, revealing – with typical Kashyapian humour – an incongruously sinister side to one of our holiest towns. Meanwhile, Sujoy Ghosh’s fine thriller Kahaani – in which a pregnant woman comes up against a calculating Intelligence Bureau as she tries to find her missing husband – made excellent, atypical use of Kolkata as a setting, and even provided solid roles to the popular Bengali actors Parambrata Chatterjee and Saswata Chatterjee (as well as a supporting part for the veteran Dhritaman Chatterjee, who was such an arresting presence 40 years ago in Satyajit Ray’s Pratidwandi). This is not something that would have happened in a mainstream Hindi movie a few years ago.

Bengali characters also featured in cute takes on inter-community relationships in two of the year’s warmest “little” films. In a charming scene in Shoojit Sircar’s Vicky Donor, a Bengali girl hums a few notes of Rabindrasangeet to her Punjabi boyfriend; they are in a car somewhere between Lajpat Nagar and Chittaranjan Park (two south Delhi colonies located near each other in physical space, but traditionally the bastions of very different communities), and the scene is an important bonding moment in a romance between two people who hail from different universes. There is an interestingly similar moment near the end of Sameer Sharma’s Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana, where a young Punjabi man serenades his lover with a Bangla song in the presence of his startled family, who can’t even make sense of what they are hearing. The scene feels a bit like cultural stereotyping at first (“Punjabis masculine, Bengalis effeminate”) but the film is clearly on the side of the young lovers, so it works well.

In any case, both Vicky Donor and Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana simultaneously indulge and overturn conventional tropes of “Punjabiyat”, encouraging us to see their people as individuals - capable of personal growth - rather than as representations of groups, permanently fixed in a way of life and thought. And ultimately perhaps that is the best way to make a film about the many colliding realities of a complex country. It's a lesson Bollywood has shown itself willing to learn in the past 12 months.

[Some longer posts about these films: Paan Singh Tomar, Gangs of Wasseypur, Kahaani, Vicky Donor]